The Campaign to End the New Jim Crow may not yet be the new abolition movement, but the problem it addresses may be as difficult to eradicate as slavery was two centuries ago. The campaign takes its name from a recent book called “The New Jim Crow” written by Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander. She argues, with considerable evidence, that mass incarceration — the U.S. confines 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, though it has only five percent of the world’s population — is, indeed, an effort to prevent black men from full participation in American society, as was Jim Crow a century ago.

As a post middle-age white woman who stood on the sidelines of the civil rights movement, the comparison between ending slavery and ending the New Jim Crow has come frequently to mind as I work with several dozen others in Trenton and Princeton on local efforts to end mass incarceration. We are black and white, men and women, young and old, and some of us have had recent experience working in prisons. This connection occurred to me over the weekend as, along with 100 or more others — mainly black, but some white — I attended a screening of a new documentary on the school-to-prison pipeline. Called “Elementary Genocide,” it emphasizes the sad truth that black boys who aren’t yet reading competently at age 10 are far more likely to wind up incarcerated than in a respectable job.

Until I started teaching in a New Jersey prison last summer, I’d hardly been aware of mass incarceration, and when I read Alexander’s book, I wasn’t initially convinced. Yes, at least 60 percent of the prisoners I saw were black (others were mainly Latino; some were white), but was this the result of conscious repression, as was the earlier Jim Crow? If we focus on drug-related crimes, a reasonable answer is yes. Another documentary I saw recently, “The House I Live In,” effectively claims that the drug war itself began during the Nixon administration as part of the “Southern strategy.” It was continued by the Reagans’ “Just Say No” campaign and mandatory sentencing laws, then intensified by the Clinton administration’s “three strikes and you’re in [prison]” policy.

Though another prominent writer — Yale law professor James Forman Jr. — has argued in the lengthy article “Beyond the New Jim Crow” that focusing on drug offenses distorts the fuller reality of mass incarceration, it’s the drug offenses that are, well, the most offensive. Users and dealers, mainly street-level, account for half of all federal prisoners and one-quarter of those in New Jersey state prisons. Reputable researchers argue persuasively that drug use in white communities is at least as prevalent as in black communities, but blacks are far more likely to serve long prison sentences for such use.

Further, as “The House I Live In” points out, police departments have become complicit in the drug war — it’s far easier to arrest a dozen young black men on a drug charge than to pursue someone else on a more complicated one. And, because prosecutors and public defenders are so overburdened with low-level drug dealers, plea bargains with mandatory sentences are often the outcome.

So, off go the young men (and some women) to prison, for sentences ranging from a year or two to 15 or more. White folks like me likely haven’t much thought of what this is doing to black communities. In cities like Trenton, many classrooms include a half-dozen or more students who are affected by the incarceration of a father, a neighbor, or an aunt. Once released, these prisoners are barred from many jobs, from getting student loans, from housing or food assistance. Recidivism results.

But, as many members of the audience who watched “Elementary Genocide” pointed out, what options do young boys, in particular, see? Trenton’s black communities once abounded with black-owned businesses; now they are replaced by malls that affluent blacks can patronize. And the factory jobs that supported these businesses’ customers have disappeared, too. If the only people making money are drug dealers, what are the options?

Sure, we can throw out a dozen arguments about personal responsibility, and many in the “Elementary Genocide” audience did just that. But what really outrages me are the hundreds of businesses run by well-educated, and mainly white, people who construct prisons and push governmental bodies to convict enough (usually black) people to keep the cells full, who sell dollar-per-minute phone cards to prisoners, or run commissaries that charge $5 for a pad of paper.

As with the abolition movement, so many of us are complicit in the policies that led to mass incarceration — and in the myriad businesses that profit from it — that it will take a generation or more, and a mass movement like abolition, to end it.

So, let’s begin.

Connie Goddard, Ph.D., is a member of the Trenton Campaign to End the New Jim Crow. She has taught in the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prison program as an adjunct professor at Mercer County Community College.